Bingo. My thanks to Michael Perelman for his recent mention here on the list of Carlos Baker's Emerson Among the Eccentrics, which contains this nugget:
"As Emerson afterward expressed it, there was 'something military' in Thoreau's nature, 'not to be subdued, always manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition. He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory ... required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum to call his powers into full exercise.' ... On hearing any proposition, 'his first instinct ... was to controvert it,' and in a manner 'never affectionate but superior, didactic,' scornful of the 'petty ways' of his interlocutors, like a New England Socrates at his most eristic."
Carl
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